Mary O’Hara, chief human resource officer and senior vice president of internal communications at Blue Shield of California, thinks it’s crucial for organizations to formulate what she calls a “people strategy”—and to use that approach to ultimately fuel overall business strategy. “It’s really important to truly understand what your capability and capacity is at any given point in time both from a risk-assessment and from an assurance of execution point of view. This helps to evaluate at what pace your business strategy can unfold,” she says. For this reason, Blue Shield—which currently
serves almost 4.4 million members and nearly 65,000 physicians—integrates business planning with human capital management (HCM) as well as with financial strategy. By deploying a unified cloud solution from a single vendor for both enterprise resource planning (ERP) and HCM software, Blue Shield achieved complete visibility of data from the human capital side and the financial side, avoiding silos as well as any need to integrate data from different sources.